Maia Ramsden wants to go pro AND get a PhD?!

Jumping on this post to mention that Burkina Faso's Hugues Fabrice Zango (World Indoor + Outdoor reigning TJ champ, Olympic bronze medalist) has recently achieved his PhD in Electrical Engineering, a mighty impressive feat that seems to have gone unpraised in the T&F world!

Comments like this make Letsrun worse.

A selection of article titles from the Environmental Humanities journal most recent edition:

- Blue Humanities and the Color of Colonialism

- The Deep Time Trap: Retracing Settler Colonialism in Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”

- Plant Infrastructure: Mangoes, Race, and Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Miami

- Decolonizing the History of Human-Plant Relations

I wish I was joking...

So you are opposed to tax breaks for megachurches who have become tools of Trumpism and promote him from the pulpit? You are opposed to tax breaks for all the groups supporting Trump, Trumpism, conservative causes who operate as tax exempt non-profits? You are opposed to grants for religious schools or tax dollars supporting conservative and religious charter schools? Those are all your tax dollars. Glad to hear you are consistent!

Let’s run is the lowest common denominator.

Pretty much. Most of what you can gather from this thread is that most people on LetsRun think education only exists to produce value for companies/society as $$$ for companies. Art, philosophy, and education for education's sake are all pointless, I guess. Everyone smart should go get an MBA and take classes about Excel sheets.

Regardless of whether you agree with Ramsden's politics, this kind of contempt for a liberal arts education (a term which has nothing to do with "liberal" as it is used in common political parlance and everything to do with a rich history of education stretching back to ancient Greece, which posters here might know if they took liberal arts education seriously) is bound to have serious negative consequences for democracy and society more broadly.

But hey, Ramsden could be producing shareholder value! Why is she wasting her time?

speaking of aerospace engineering, andy baddeley of britain has a masters in aerospace engineering from the university of cambridge of all places!

Gabby Thomas has a master's degree in public health and epidemiology, and her mom wishes her to consider a PhD. Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers has a PhD in Engineering and helps design missile defense systems, while Brian May of Queen has a PhD is astrophysics.

This attitude, "Why study anything that won't help you make big money," that's become more and more common among conservatives is from what I can tell, a new, and depressing, development. Writers like Michael Novak and George Will have always expressed near reverence for classical learning and intellectual discipline. I have probably disagreed with more of what such writers have written over the years than I've agreed with but there have been times I have agreed with them and other times when something they've written has gotten me to reconsider a belief or two that I had. That was because they showed evidence of broad historical and cultural knowledge and framed their arguments in more sophisticated terms than "the bastards are taxing my money and giving it to minorities and immigrants."

People here act like in you're doing to be a "pro" aka nationally-top level runner, your time is 100% invested in running and there is no time for anything else. The truth is that this is absolutely not correct and "elites" have tons of down time, spending it getting massages, taking naps, and (no joke) "watching netflix" between their morning and afternoon runs. Furthermore, there are NUMEROUS examples of successful runners (often without a sponsorship) who have succeeded while working or invest their time elsewhere while training.

Dakotah Lindwurm - Works full time as a paralegal while qualifying for the 2024 Olympic Marathon
Kiera D'Amato - was setting American Records working as a relator without a sponsorship
Martin Hehir - ran as a pro while in medical school DOING ROUNDS
Nell Rojas - Finished top 10 at Boston TWICE unsponsored while owning and running a gym
Molly Seidel - Worked part time at Starbucks when she qualified for the 2020 Olympic Marathon
Honorable Mention - Morgan Pearson, who is a triathlete and not a full time runner, has competed in and WON races against nationally-elite fields.

Also think back in the day before sponsorships - "elites" HAD to have jobs or continued training during grad school. Frank Shorter WON AN OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL WHILE IN LAW SCHOOL. 50 years later, his marathon times would still put him in the top of group of American man and that's without the help of modern super shoes.

This begs the question - if you're a shoe company, is it worth it to fund your athletes at the level they're at, considering many without any sort of financial support are thriving and succeeding while beating those with "full funding?"

Perhaps because she has a soul.

If she is wired to do well in STEM subjects, she could easily do that PhD.

She also seems smart enough to network and market herself well! People like her work hard but *usually* never really struggle or get laid off because they understand the importance of connections and have that Harvard backing (or Ivy) to help.

Very salient point and good contrast.

It also helps coming from a family with Ivy (not necessarily her) or other elite connections to start out with.

I see this a bit in Cbus. Kids grow up in Dublin/UA, their parents either work big bank jobs at Huntington/Chase or Nationwide + medical at OSU/OhioHealth and they attend either the nice public or one of the 6 Catholic schools in Cbus. They go to mid-majors or OSU, maybe some Ivy, etc., maybe schools in between, and then they come home and do the same thing after graduating undergrad--landing a nice role at the same corporations their parents/peers were in, move out to the suburbs, and do the same thing...

What kinds of skills would they lack? Having STEM is a foundational skill for aerospace engineering.

I half agree with this. Classical learning is indeed dying, and that is the fault of liberals and conservatives alike. Conservatives of the American variety tend to scoff at anything that does not promote shareholder value and utility. Education is for STEM or business, otherwise it is a waste of time and money. Meanwhile, progressives have taken over the humanities, so instead of reading dead white males like Plato and Shakespeare and Donne and Eliot, etc., these programs either a) teach students how to dissect these works, not for their art or beauty or intellectual worth, but for the supposedly colonialist/racist/sexist biases of the authors or b) skip them entirely in favor of random nonwhite nonmale authors dug up to put on the syllabus. Meanwhile, the West is dying.

Ramsden’s thesis subject sounds predictably stupid, but you can’t really blame her when conservatives have largely abandoned the Great Books as useless, which just opens up the space for this crap.

Read Roger Scruton, John Henry Newman, T.S. Eliot in your free time instead.

It's not contempt for liberal arts. Studying Latin, Greek, classics, and great books is important.

Studying woke garbage like "Astroenvironmentalism as SF: Bordering (and Ordering) Otherworldly Ecologies", "Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons", or "“These Lusting, Incestuous, Perverse Creatures”: A Phytopoetic History of Plants and Sexuality" is pointless.

I think it’s safe to say your life already is miserable.